Tag: marriage

To all the people who believe that I have a secret agenda behind my writings on gay marriage, that my true intention is to push the Orthodox Church to become more Episcopalian (which is apparently an insult), to make our priests wear rainbow colored vestments and bless the marriages between two men and a horse, picture me blowing you a raspberry.

Honestly, I was tempted to make a ruder gesture, but that wouldn’t set a very good example now would it? Obergefell v. Hodges made gay civil marriage legal, which means that for me, as an issue, it has more or less dropped off my list of priorities.

The thing to realize is that nobody’s doctrine has changed. The Romans are not essentially more Orthodox, and the Orthodox are not more gay. But Pope Francis already indicated, in a statement about divorce, that the Catholic Church could learn a thing or two about pastoral care from the Orthodox. Namely, Roman Catholicism needs a little oikonomia.

Oikonomia, or “economy,” is about how the rules get applied in everyday life. Like Catholics, we have canon law, but just because the canons say something does not mean that we always must do them. Sometimes a priest or bishop will suspend the law for the sake of the individual soul. The Orthodox Church has long recognized that sinful humans will fall short of the ideal expected of them, and so the church must reach a hand down, to meet people where they are, in order to help bring them up to where they need to be.

So, when it comes to divorce, Orthodox and Catholics believe basically the same thing. Marriage is a sacrament. Jesus said in the Bible, “And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery” (‭Matthew‬ ‭19‬:‭9‬ NKJV). For us (Orthodox), our ideal is that a person would marry only once. A person who is widowed is encouraged to pursue a life of celibacy. Then again, celibacy is hard. That is why the Orthodox Church will perform a second or third marriage (never a fourth). “For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (1 Cor. 7:9). But this principle does not just apply to those who have lost a spouse. It applies to the divorced as well. For the Roman Catholics, to perform a second marriage on a divorced person would be to condone adultery. That is why, in general, Catholics who divorce and remarry are excommunicated. For the Orthodox, it would be a sin not to extend a helping hand to someone who is trying to stay on the straight and narrow. So we will marry divorced persons. The ceremony is different. It is a bit more penitential. But it is valid. Marriage is a sacrament, and sacraments are healing for those who seek them. Basically, when it comes to sin and repentance, we try to err on the side of mercy.

The document released by Synod 14 deals with a broad range of family issues, including divorced and non-traditional families. What it has to say about gays and lesbians is pretty brief.

Providing for homosexual persons

50. Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community … Are our communities capable of…accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?

51. The question of homosexuality requires serious reflection on how to devise realistic approaches to affective growth, human development and maturation in the Gospel, while integrating the sexual aspect, all of which constitute an important educative challenge. …

52. Without denying the moral problems associated with homosexual unions, there are instances where mutual assistance to the point of sacrifice is a valuable support in the life of these persons. Furthermore, the Church pays special attention to […] children who live with same-sex couples and stresses that the needs and rights of the little ones must always be given priority.

I should note that, according to the National Catholic Reporter, English-speaking cardinals have altered the above translation to minimize the softer tone taken in the official Italian version. That same report also sums up the point of the entire document. According to Cardinal Christoph Schönborn (Austria), “The basic principle is that we first look at the person and not the sexual orientation.” That, right there, is oikonomia.

Point 50 is just raising the question of whether and how Roman Catholics can welcome gays and lesbians without compromising their doctrines. The part about “valuing their sexual orientation” should not be taken as a hint that Catholic priests are about to start donning rainbow vestments, but it owes to the recognition that to love someone is to love everything that she is. Period. There are no conditions.

Point 51 reminds me of a story Fr. Joseph Huneycutt tells in One Flew Over the Onion Dome. A man meets with a priest to talk about Orthodox Christianity, and the priest says, “The first thing we need to do is talk about God, the church, and the sacraments,” at which point the man interrupts the priest with, “Father, I’m gay!” The priest pauses and says, “Okay. But the first thing we need to do is talk about God, the church, and the sacraments.” I am telling that story from memory, so I may have some of the details wrong, but I think I captured the gist of it. Priests do not deal with sexual orientations. They deal with people.

Point 52 reaffirms what the Catholic Church teaches about the ideal of marriage being between a male and a female. But it also recognizes that Christians are not Manichaeans. We do not divide the world between the holy and the sinful, the light and the dark. In this life, the two are always a bit mixed up. Wherever there is love, there is God at work. This statement also acknowledges what people who have gay friends already know: same-sex couples do find their partners to be a source of love and emotional support. If you disagree, you need more gay friends.

Do you know who else made slippery slope arguments? … Hitler!

Reactionary types still will not like what they see coming out of the Catholic Church. They will say that Pope Francis is taking the church down a slippery slope, but slippery slope arguments are for panicky people who do not want to think too hard. Everybody on both sides of this issue needs to calm down a bit. Pope Francis has done nothing more than address the very real pastoral challenges the Roman Catholic Church must deal with in today’s world, and it is drawing upon the Orthodox principle of oikonomia to do it. We Orthodox should do the same.

Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo both agree that sex poses a spiritual risk, but each thinks about the nature of that risk, and thus the best response to it, in terms not easily reconciled, so that what is of secondary importance for Augustine is primary for Nyssen. For Augustine, the problem with sex is not pleasure. It is pride. Pleasure is only a problem because we are fallen. It contributes to the self-delusion of pride and thus weakens the will by dividing its loves between the true love of God and the false love of self. The spiritual danger of sex is thus, in a word, spiritual. But pride does not feature in Gregory of Nyssa’s anthropology, at least not when he thinks about the Fall. He agrees that we are disordered, but this disorder has to do with an imbalance between the internal and external life rather than the internal life with itself. Pleasure caused the Fall by distracting us, and pleasure keeps us fallen by continuing to distract us, siphoning off spiritual energy that could otherwise go toward our beatification. Disciplining the body and bringing it under the rule of the rational mind begins to return us to Eden. This is not anthropological dualism; Gregory does not deny the goodness of the body. This is to misunderstand asceticism. Ascetic discipline does not reject the body because it needs the body to train the soul. Chastity is the foundation of the ascetic life because it refocuses our energies onto the Good, putting us back on the path toward prelapsarian integrity. By withdrawing from the distractions of the flesh, we begin to master it, transforming sarx back into soma.[1]

The following has been adapted from a much longer essay in a forthcoming book by Theotokos Press. Part 1 of this essay can be found here.

Gregory of Nyssa thought of sex in eschatological terms. He was born an aristocrat. Citizens of his rank were taught that, apart from the expectation to produce male offspring who would grow up to oversee the family’s estates, sex was innocuous. As Peter Brown has noted, for a Christian of Gregory’s rank, celibacy was an act of protest against this passing order for the sake of the kingdom to come.[1] It was a martyr-like decision. St. Athansius cited Christian fearlessness in the face of death as proof that Christ was raised from the dead.[2] The same was true of the abstinent. Aristocrats had babies because they feared death, and with it, the loss of property and reputation. But Gregory believed that birth only feeds the grave. Whether adult children find the cold body of their grandmother in her bed, or terrified parents try to cool their gasping, feverish infant, both witness the order Christ came to vanquish by the power of the cross. Death is the last enemy to be overcome (see 1 Cor. 15:26), it gnaws away at the living, and it is a foe against which both martyr and virgin have declared war. Continue reading “Gregory of Nyssa on Sin and Sex”

The following has been adapted from a much longer essay in a forthcoming book by Theotokospress.

Augustine of Hippo infamously declared that sex was sinful even within loving marriages. It can be tempting for we anachronistic Illuminati to wag our fingers and scold his memory for being such a “prude,” but, as John Cavadini pointed out, “To fault Augustine in this context for not realizing that ‘sexual pleasure’ can enrich a couple’s relationship, or to assess Augustine’s views against our own more ‘positive’ view, may be, with all due respect, to beg the question.” In other words, before we dismiss Augustine, we should ask ourselves in what way he might have been right. Who is to say that sex – even within the confines of marriage – is always, or even mostly, a good thing? Perhaps Augustine was wrong. Or perhaps we like sex and prefer not to think too much about its spiritual consequences. Cavadini continues, “For Augustine, the question would not be whether sexual pleasure can enrich a couple’s relationship, but whether there is any sexual pleasure possible without a taint of violence or complacency (’self-pleasing’) in it.”[1] The fact that Augustine thought there was sin in sex means that he thought of sex fundamentally in spiritual terms. He charted a middle way between the naïve Pelagianism of Julian of Eclanum, who saw conjugal sex as something innocent and harmless, and rigorist ascetics who would have every Christian don the black. These perspectives (the Pelagian and ascetic) only seem disparate, but they both share an anthropology which sees sex as something belonging merely to the flesh. For Augustine, sexual intercourse was a spiritual event with spiritual implications. In sex, Christian charity, sinful lust, the weakened will, and our divided loves meet in a moment of intense bodily pleasure. This makes sex, in a word, complicated.

Augustine did not think sex was inherently sinful. For Augustine, God create Adam and Eve male and female, and thus God intended our different sexual organs to serve a divine purpose.[2] It is only lust that makes sex sinful. In our fallen state, our sexual desires, and thus our bodies, are never fully under our control. Eden was different: Continue reading “Augustine on Sin and Sex”

The following is a brief summary and response to a short paper delivered at the Sophia Institute Conference, December 7, at Union Theological Seminary, NY.

In this paper, Dcn. Drew Maxwell argued that an overly negative view of human sexuality is one unfortunate consequence of the modern turn to patristic sources. Theology is deeply informed by context. Most patristic and medieval theologians were monks and often wrote to celibates, which is why their writings often stressed celibacy over married intimacy. In some cases, there may have been genuine disdain for the married life; in others we are merely witnessing a kind of pastoral encouragement. If modern readers forget the importance of context, they can walk away from such resources with a distorted view of what their own marriages should be.